Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel delivered an unbeatable show stopping performance, as he took the chequered flag at the end of the Formula One 2011 inaugural Indian Grand Prix. Consequently, the newly crowned back to back World Champion has now added to his growing statistics this season. After 79 race starts in his F1 career to date the German has notched up 21 wins and sealed his 11th victory so far this year following today’s result. The 24 year old has also over taken former F1 driver Nigel Mansell’s record, and is now the man of the moment after leading the most laps in a season. Vettel explained how he felt the first Indian Grand Prix went, and expressed his feelings on being the first to take pole position and win the race there.

“It was a very good race for us and I enjoyed it… The car was very well balanced and it was a fantastic race today. Thanks to the whole team and to Renault, who have done an exceptional job so far this season. But I have mixed emotions today. I’m very proud to be the first winner of the Indian Grand Prix, but on the other hand we lost two of our mates recently. I didn’t know Dan Wheldon, but obviously he was a big name in motorsport.

 

I got to know Marco Simoncelli this year and our thoughts are with their families at this time. We are ready to take certain risks, but obviously we pray that nothing happens; sometimes you get reminded and that’s the last thing we want to see… It’s a very impressive country here, very different to what we know in Europe, but very inspiring,” commented Vettel.

As race leader and winner Vettel was out of reach on the whole, second placeman Jenson Button did his best to get as close as possible. The Englishman still drove a cracking race in the end and picked up some valuable points for McLaren, and for his current hold on second place in the Drivers’ Championship. Meanwhile, Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso completed the podium of Champions as he secured third place today.

As the lights went out to mark the race debut at the Buddh International Circuit, the action on the track that the drivers put on certainly did not disappoint. Inevitably, as Vettel and Webber maintained their positions when they set off on the first lap, the pair were oblivious to events unfolding further down the field. A select few of the drivers were victims in the contact, which included a couple of midfield runners with back markers. Sauber’s Kamui Kobayashi, Williams’ driver Rubens Barrichello, Marussia Virgin Racing’s Timo Glock and Jarno Trulli for Team Lotus were the unlucky four before their race had barely begun. Sadly, Kobayashi became the first driver to bow out of the Grand Prix. The Japanese driver was seen abandoning his car out on the back straight, which signaled the end of his appearance in the rest of the race. Although Kobayashi’s Mexican team mate Sergio Perez was not involved in the early action, he was the first driver in the field to pit for a tyre change.

Unfortunately Barrichello and Glock had to pit unexpectedly unlike Perez. Both drivers made an unscheduled stop to repair the damage to their cars which required them to have a replacement front wing fitted. Reports from the Williams team soon emerged that Barrichello had contact with his Venezuelan team mate Pastor Maldonado which led to some other drivers being collected in the process. At the time of the coming together between the pair, Trulli spun which caused a right rear tyre puncture but the Italian driver continued on in the race after a pit stop. As well as Kobayashi being an early retirement from the race, Glock soon accompanied him by lap two. The German driver went back to the garage and was not able to take any further part in the proceedings.

While the activity was going on towards the back of the back, there was some excitement where the front runners were concerned. Button spotted a window of opportunity early on to pass Red Bull’s Mark Webber. The Australian did not appear to be able to put up much of a fight which allowed the 2009 World Champion to take second place with ease. Alonso was then running closely behind Webber, but the Spaniard was followed by his Brazilian team mate Felipe Massa. Following Hamilton’s three place grid drop which took effect after qualifying yesterday, the Englishman also suffered in the first few laps of the race. The 2008 World Champion fell from fifth place to sixth position after the start.

However, the Mercedes boys seemed to have a better stroke of luck as they made their way through the field. First of all Nico Rosberg had the upper hand over his veteran team mate Michael Schumacher. Initially the pair were running well in seventh and eighth place respectively. Although the Toro Rosso drivers had impressed in qualifying yesterday, their efforts which got them through to Q3 were short lived as they started the race. Both Jaime Alguersuari and Sebastien Buemi found themselves drop out of the top 10 for a while. Instead, Force India’s Adrian Sutil was flying the flag for his team’s home Grand Prix, and got into ninth place in the first couple of laps, while Lotus Renault’s Bruno Senna closely followed the German driver and was running in 10th place at the time.

 

Towards the front of the field the competition was close in the initial stages of the race. Top Championship rivals Button and Webber were scrapping over second place. After Webber had lost the place earlier on to Button, the pair soon resumed their battle from lap four onwards. On lap five it looked like Webber got the opportunity to pass by when Button locked up his tyres temporarily. Fortunately, Button did not yield second place and defended his position well against Webber. First of all it looked like Button had run out of track when he went to take the racing line, and Webber nearly got a little too close for comfort. Sadly, Webber was not able to find a big enough gap to snatch back the place then.

As Button and Webber’s scrap continued over several laps, a midfield battle emerged over 12th place on lap seven. Senna was leading the trio concerned and holding onto 10th place. The Brazilian driver was potentially under fire from Alguersuari and Buemi though, who were climbing their way back towards the front of the field.

Meanwhile, the leading pair were getting down to business on lap eight. Vettel extended the gap between himself and second placeman Button by 4.7secs. On the other hand, Button was also on a mission to catch the pole sitter in the distance. When the pair completed the following lap, Vettel proved the margin between them was growing as he topped the timesheets. His speedy lap time at this early stage of the race was a 1:31.308secs.

The battle previously at the forefront of the racing action reappeared a few laps later when Buemi was able to slip past Senna and made his move stick. As a result of this scrap for position, Buemi was promoted to 11th place, and Senna dropped to 12th position. This meant that a possible in-team battle would emerge between Buemi and his Spanish team mate Alguersuari. The duo found themselves together again, but Alguersuari was ahead of the Swiss driver and running in 10th place on lap 10.

During the very same lap as the midfield runners battling for position, the stewards announced their decision following an investigation into the lap one incidents. They decided that no further action would be taken on the events that had unfolded early on.

Around lap 11 of the 60 lap duration Force India’s Paul Di Resta was the first to blink at this point for a tyre change. The F1 rookie re-joined the race to form an interesting scrap in the field. The Scotsman led the trio of drivers in 16th place from Perez in 17th position. Lotus Renault’s Vitaly Petrov made up the three-way battle in 18th place. The scrap between the drivers did not take long to get competitive. Initially Perez spotted the chance and past Di Resta to take 16th place on lap 12. However, the change in positions between the pair did not last for too many laps, Di Resta soon came back at Perez to get ahead of him again.

While the drivers in the midfield fought for position, the battle at the front was also heating up between the leading runners. Fortunately, Button picked up the pace and actually topped the timesheets over Vettel on lap 11. Although he was still maintaining second place, Button crossed the line with a lap time of 1:31.070secs. As a result of this extra speed that Button had acquired, it acted as a warning to Vettel that he was in close company. In fact, the lap times were not too far apart between the drivers at this point. On lap 13 only six seconds separated the top three runners, and 10 seconds between the top five drivers overall.

 

As the outsider drivers had found themselves at the heart of the action early on in the Grand Prix, this trend seemed to continue as the laps progressed. The next battle for position was seen between Sutil and Alguersuari from lap 14 onwards. At that point in the proceedings, Sutil had the upper hand in ninth place, and Alguersuari was trailing him in 10th position. On the other hand, Alguersuari saw an opportunity to sneak past Sutil. The pair soon changed positions for a short while, until a few other drivers decided to muscle in on the action. When Alguersuari was running well in ninth place, Sutil was suddenly under pressure from Buemi. Sadly, Sutil was not able to match Buemi’s pace at this point. Nevertheless, Buemi ended up in 10th place accompanying his team mate Alguersuari. The pair had finally got back to the positions they started the race from, whereas Sutil then slipped down to 11th place. At this point in time Sutil did not appear to be in the best place, and this may have prompted his pit stop shortly after.

As a result of visiting the pits for a tyre change, Sutil re-joined the race in 13th place. His decision to make a stop on lap 16, had an unexpected benefit for Team Lotus’ Heikki Kovalainen. The Finnish driver was promoted into 12th place when Sutil was out of the way temporarily. However, Sutil found himself in close company with his team mate Di Resta who was holding onto 14th place. This made way not only for a potential in-team battle, but also with the drivers that followed behind them. Perez was on Di Resta’s tail in 15th place and Petrov was maintaining 16th position then.

Despite the scraps for position occurring in the field, Maldonado’s incident came into the limelight on lap 14. He was driving down the back straight of the circuit, and on the run down to Turn four he rapidly left the track. Maldonado was running in 13th place when the rear axle locked up on his car, and it was soon reported that a gearbox failure had spelt the end of the F1 rookie’s race.

With another driver retirement from the race the rest of the field continued to battle on with their rivals. When the pit stop window appeared for the front runners, Webber, Massa and Hamilton were the first three to have their tyre change. Following Alonso’s scrap for position with Schumacher on lap 17, Alonso was running in seventh place and chasing Schumacher. However, there was a close encounter between Alonso and team mate Massa shortly after this. Massa re-joined the race in sixth place after his pit stop, and as Alonso was passing the pit exit the pair missed each other by a whisker. Consequently, Alonso had the momentum to pass by and then took fourth place from Schumacher as well.

Similarly another scrap that formed at this point was between Button and Webber. Before Button made the decision make his pit stop, Webber was only five seconds away from him. Despite the small margin between the drivers, Button re-joined the race in second place and Webber was still running in third position.

The popularity of the pit stop phase continued at this stage as Vettel, Schumacher and Buemi were among those to do the same. Meanwhile, Massa was picking up the pace in fifth place. He was running so well at this point that he topped the timesheets with a lap of 1:30.243secs. When Schumacher had got back into the swing of things after his pit stop, he managed to catch up with Senna who was yet to have a tyre change. Schumacher’s persistence soon paid off when he had the chance and took eighth place from the Brazilian driver.

At this stage in the race proceedings, Vettel was still leading and topping the board with his laps. On lap 22 he was inevitably the fastest man on the track with a 1:30.058secs. It was a few laps later when Button had closed the gap on Vettel, and the pair were only 3.7 seconds adrift on lap 23.

 

While the competition between the top two drivers was in progress, Button’s team mate Hamilton was having a heated scrap with Massa. Hamilton attempted to overtake Massa and went down the inside of the Brazilian driver. Massa took the racing line at this point, and the pair made contact with each other. Hamilton had to make an unexpected visit to the pits as a result of the damage caused from the coming together. As Hamilton ended up in ninth place after the incident, Massa also appeared to have suffered damage, consequently, he ran wide at Turn seven on lap 25 but managed to hold it together in sixth place. On the following lap the incident between the two drivers came to the attention of the stewards. It was then reported that the FIA Stewards would investigate Hamilton and Massa’s incident.

The collision between Massa and Hamilton at this time seemed to have a knock effect with action elsewhere on the track. Buemi was soon added to the list of retirements already out of the race. The Swiss driver abandoned his car off the track and reportedly had a blown engine on lap 26.

The period of car reliability issues seemed to continue for a few laps. Massa reported via the team radio that he had a gearbox problem, which at that point caused concern if it was as a result of his contact with Hamilton. Massa’s race situation worsened on lap 30 when he was issued with a drive through penalty for causing a collision. Nevertheless, he served the penalty on the following lap, and had to pit soon after this stop for a tyre change and new nose cone. Initially after the penalty stop he re-joined the race in seventh place, but after his second visit to the pits he was running in 11th place.

Meanwhile, the drivers near the front of the field which included Massa’s team mate Alonso, were competing against each other with lap times. Alonso was the first to blink and topped the timesheets with a lap time of 1:29.568secs and Vettel went on to beat this with a 1:29.510secs.

After Massa and Hamilton’s coming together both drivers were climbing their way back up the field. Hamilton’s first target was Alguersuari on lap 31. Inevitably, Hamilton made an easy pass and took eighth place from Alguersuari. When Massa had made his two consecutive visits to the pits for different reasons, he came into contact with the midfield pack. One of these drivers included Petrov on lap 32. Consequently, Petrov seemed to falter under the pressure, as Massa was bearing down on the Russian driver. After having a slight wobble and hitting the end of the kerb, Petrov ran wide temporarily and allowed Massa to pass. The line-up then saw Massa ahead in 11th place, and Petrov trailing behind in 12th position.

 

Towards the front of the field the scraps for position continued. Webber had the upper hand and was holding onto third place, but Alonso was on his tail in fourth position on lap 34. The two drivers chased each other for several laps, and worked in sync with each other when the next pit stops arrived. Webber appeared to suffer from a lack of tyre grip, which prompted him to have a tyre change on lap 38. Alonso responded to this decision by Webber and also pitted, but managed to maintain his third place though. As a result of this Webber was still following behind Alonso and maintaining fourth place.

Whilst Alonso and Webber were disputing track position, Alonso’s team mate Massa could not join in with such things for much longer. On lap 34 he appeared to suffer damage to the front left suspension on his car. After hitting a kerb which sent him off the track, Massa was forced to abandon his car and retired from the race.

At the time of Vettel extending his lead and pipping his previous lap times, Petrov had another detour and took the scenic route temporarily before getting back on track. He then found himself scrapping for position with Kovalainen on lap 37. Initially, Kovalainen was running ahead in 12th place, but he soon dropped to 13th position. Petrov took advantage of an opportunity to pass by, which led Kovalainen to drop down the field. While Kovalainen was ahead of his team mate, Trulli was making the back of the pack in 19th position.

After a previous battle for position in the midfield had gone on earlier in the race, Sutil was holding onto 10th place ahead of Perez who trailed behind in 11th position on lap 43. There was a similar situation just a few places down the pack as well. As the only Indian driver representing his country in the race today, Hispania Racing’s Narain Karthikeyan was struggling to hold off Barrichello on lap 43. As a result of this, Karthikeyan dropped down to 16th place, as Barrichello took 15th position from him.

Where the outside of the top 10 scrap for position was concerned, Sutil and Perez continued to fight over 10th place as the final spot to pick up a point. On lap 45 of the race Sutil was running in 10th place ahead of Perez who was just behind him in 11th position. On the other hand, Petrov was not too far away from the pair and trailing them in 12th place at the time. As well as this battle heating up between the trio, there was the prospect of an in-team battle between Rosberg and his team mate and fellow German Schumacher. Before Rosberg made a pit stop for a tyre change on lap 46, he was holding onto fifth place, and Schumacher was just behind him in sixth position. However, Schumacher was handed fifth place when Rosberg was out of the picture temporarily when he pitted.

 

While Schumacher and Rosberg were scrapping over fifth place, the McLaren boys also worked in sync with each other in a similar way to Mercedes. Hamilton was the first of the two drivers to pit, and re-joined the race in eighth place. Subsequently, Button nodded to Hamilton’s pit stop and made his as well. The Briton re-joined the action on the track in second place again. Although on his way to doing so, Button was nearly collected by the traffic that he met as he emerged from the pits.

The likelihood of Schumacher and Rosberg to have a close scrap began to unfold on lap 51. Schumacher made his pit stop for a tyre change and was running in fifth place, while Rosberg was still following his team mate and maintaining sixth position. Following Schumacher’s visit to the pits the seven time World Champion appeared to have a slight wobble. He temporarily locked up his tyres as he went through the first corner. As a result of this minor mishap, Schumacher led the way for Rosberg to close the gap on him, as he was running behind the veteran driver in sixth place. For the remaining laps in the race the pair continued to fight over fifth place, but Schumacher kept it all the way to the chequered flag. Consequently, Schumacher landed himself the higher position over Rosberg. This meant that Rosbserg had to settle for second best and finished behind Schumacher in sixth place.

With the closing stages of the race fast approaching, Vettel made the most of the opportunity to improve on his lap times. On lap 56 he went on to top the timesheets once again with a lap time of 1:27.782secs. Despite Vettel being the man to achieve the most with the race win, midfield runner Senna had also done well in the race for another reason. Remarkably, he had managed to drive a long distance with just one pit stop, but was forced to make a late one towards the end on lap 58. He had been running in ninth place, but dropped to 12th position as a result of this. When Senna was out of the way making his necessary pit stop, his team mate Petrov was able to nip ahead in the line-up. Before Petrov was able to do this, he had been scrapping for position with Perez. The pair had been fighting over 11th place at the time, and Petrov was running behind in 12th place. Their scrap continued right until the final lap and Perez finished better off in 10th place, and Petrov followed behind him just out of the points in 11th place.

As the race was coming to an end, Vettel proved that he was untouchable. He went on to set another fastest lap as he approached the final lap. He topped the timesheets with a 1:27.457secs. The speedy lap times that Vettel put in as the race came to a close meant that he had built up an 8.2 second lead ahead of second place man Button. Although Alonso crossed the line to take third place, he came under pressure from Webber once again, but managed to finish that one place better off than Webber. Hamilton was also among the group of top title contenders to finish in the points and ended the race in seventh position overall.

As the sole Toro Rosso to complete the Grand Prix, Alguersuari picked up an impressive eighth place for himself, while Sutil had the better result for his team on home soil to take ninth place, as Di Resta missed out on a point scoring position in 13th place. Kovalainen achieved a higher finish over his team mate Trulli. The Team Lotus duo landed 14th and 19th place respectively. As a result of Maldonado retiring from the race, Barrichello was the remaining Williams in the final classification and could only manage 15th place in the end. Marussia Virgin Racing’s Jerome D’Ambrosio shared a similar situation to Barrichello, and completed the race next in 16th position. Sadly, Karthikeyan had a disappointing end to his home race and could only do enough to secure 17th place for himself. However, Karthikeyan did manage to pip his Hispania Racing team mate though. Daniel Ricciardo trailed him by one place and finished in 18th position as a result of this.

 

Due to Vettel putting another race victory under his belt, and scoring several personal achievements along with more points to his name, he was notably the best man on the track today. On the other hand, as Vettel has wrapped up the Drivers’ Championship, his closest rivals are still battling it out to take second and the following places below him. As Button picked up a solid second place in the race today, he has extended his hold on second in the Championship battle. He currently has 240 points to his name and Alonso is trailing him by 13 points at present. The margin separating Alonso from Webber is even closer, as there are just six points between the pair. Hamilton is still in contention for second place as well, but is a further 19 points behind Webber. Where the Constructors’ title is concerned, it has inevitably already gone to Red Bull. McLaren have now secured second place with the results they picked up today. Red Bull are still adding to their victory though and have 595 points, with McLaren quite a distance behind and have 442 points to their name. Ferrari are currently in third place in the standings and have 325 points.

Following today’s debut race in New Delhi, it has certainly proved to be a success. While it initially may have been a challenge for the drivers as they raced in unfamiliar surroundings, as well as race winner Vettel, the rest of the field also proved that they were not daunted by the experience. However, the battles they had with each other for position, and the impact of tyre wear did appear to make them face testing times to keep the entire field on their toes.

The Formula One fraternity now have two weeks until they head to Abu Dhabi, which they can settle back into, having raced there on several occasions with the exception of the F1 rookie drivers this season. Consequently, there are just two races remaining until the season is over for another year. It is certain that in two week’s time and for the final race, the last efforts that the drivers put in will be just as important, as they aim to beat their rivals and teams in the Championship Standings.

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2011-10-30 12:20 GMT

Taryn Luna: tluna@post-gazette.com.

First published on October 26, 2011 at 12:00 am

October 19, 2011

 

One afternoon this summer, in a park beside the Ajmil River, I sat with seven residents of Shahabuddin, a collection of villages in northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan Province. It was the first week of Ramadan, and the park was almost empty, but still the men — some middle-aged, others stooped and gray-bearded — whispered conspiratorially and became silent whenever anybody walked close. Several minutes into our conversation, one of the younger men, who’d been mutely worrying at a piece of grass, rose and abruptly stalked off. The others, embarrassed, apologized for him. “If Nur-ul Haq finds out we spoke to you,” one of them explained, “he will kill us.”

Nur-ul Haq is the commander of the Afghan Local Police in Shahabuddin. Since last winter, he has been primarily responsible for the security of the several thousand families living there. As one of the elders warily eyed two men in turbans squatting under some nearby shade, he told me that Haq and his local police had been felling people’s trees and selling them as timber. Another of the elders joined in and named three men whom he accused Haq of murdering. “These three murders are known to everyone,” he said. “Nobody knows how many others he has killed.” The former principal of a local school said that he and his eight brothers were forced to leave their village after they reported to the government that the local police had seized their family’s land. “Nur-ul Haq threatened to come with tanks and take us all out of our home and kill us if we continued to complain about him,” the man claimed, adding that he and his brothers were considering moving to Pakistan.

The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long as the foreign troops are here, he is king. The minute they go, he should leave the country.” Another agreed: “I bet he can’t stay for one night in Baghlan if there are no foreign troops.” Grinning at the prospect, the old man added, “The people will rise against him.”

Haq’s unit is one of 51 local police forces that have been established across rural Afghanistan over the last year, employing more than 8,000 villagers. Eventually, the force is expected to reach 30,000 in more than 100 sites. The rapid rollout reflects a spirited commitment to the program by the U.S. military, which claims that local police throughout the country have subdued insurgents and helped tip formerly ambivalent communities toward the government. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called the Afghan Local Police “potentially a game-changer,” and Gen. David Petraeus described it as “almost the personification of counterinsurgency.” Every U.S. officer I spoke with considers it essential to achieving a measure of stability in Afghanistan that will be sustainable in our absence. “This is our last shot,” one major told me. “If this doesn’t work, we got nothing.”

Under the auspices of Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry, the A.L.P. is technically “Afghan-owned” — a point that American officials are keen to emphasize. It would be more accurate, though, to describe it as a collaboration between the government of Afghanistan and an elite branch of the United States military called the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command (or Cfsocc, pronounced “SIFF-sock”). The origins of the A.L.P. truly began with its predecessor program, the Community Defense Initiative, which in the summer of 2009 embedded small teams of Green Berets in Afghan villages to mobilize resistance against the Taliban and other militants. The following year, when Petraeus assumed command in Afghanistan, one of his priorities was to formalize the effort and increase its scale.

Now districts that are chosen to be local police sites designate roughly 300 men to receive uniforms, salaries, AK-47’s, training from U.S. Special Operations Forces and a mandate to defend their home villages against insurgents. In theory, each local police recruit must be approved by community elders and vetted by Afghanistan’s domestic intelligence service, while each commander answers directly to a district chief of police. These safeguards, along with a strict limit on powers (the A.L.P. can’t make arrests, patrol outside their districts or possess any heavy weaponry) are intended to prevent local police from resembling the predatory militias so abhorred by Afghans for their rampant depredations throughout the 1990s.

But selectively arming portions of any given population, no matter the precautions, can be risky business in Afghanistan, and the question looming darkly over the military successes of the A.L.P. — which Petraeus credited to the fact that “no one protects their home like a homeowner” — is what other purposes might their American-supplied guns and training find, especially after foreign troops leave the country. One highly positioned Afghan official, speaking on condition of anonymity, was not optimistic. “When you have a headache, you take pills,” he told me. “Some pills will cure your headache but damage your stomach in the process. That is what we have with the A.L.P. The local police are a temporary solution. Long-term, they are poison.”

So far, the most troublesome region for the A.L.P. has been the north, where ethnic, political and tribal factions have long persecuted one another. “Land disputes, water disputes, women disputes are a portion of the aftermath of three decades of war,” says Gran Hewad, a native of Baghlan Province and a political researcher at the Afghanistan Analysts Network. The two predominant ethnicities in Baghlan are the Pashtuns and the Tajiks. After the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, the previously subjugated Tajiks consolidated power in the province, monopolizing government posts and proliferating the ranks of the national police. Today, about 80 percent of Baghlan’s national police hail from Andarab, an entirely Tajik district that is staunchly anti-Pashtun. To help offset the imbalance, the A.L.P. in Baghlan has been made almost exclusively Pashtun. While this solution may solve one problem, it has also created another. Factionalism in the north goes beyond ethnicity, and within the Pashtun community itself various distinct tribes harbor feuds that match in animosity those with the Tajiks; additionally, within each tribe, conflicts among families can date back generations. Every one of the numerous allegations of A.L.P. misconduct in Baghlan Province that Hewad and his colleagues have learned about comes from a Pashtun victim. Most have also come from Shahabuddin.

The first time I met Nur-ul Haq, I was brought to his compound in the small village of Gaji by a Pashtun tribal elder named Pir Muhammad, who made a point of denouncing critics of Haq and the A.L.P. as Tajiks conniving to keep Pashtuns under their thumb. “They were ruling over us,” he said. “With the arrival of the local police, people took a breath of relief.” Although the congested streets and mobbed bazaars of the provincial capital Pul-i-Khumri are just a 20-minute drive away, Shahabuddin’s mud-walled compounds and rutted roadways, traveled as frequently by donkey as by car, feel a world apart. Many villagers rarely visit the city, expressing a vague disdain for those who live there; the reverse, of course, is also true. To get to Gaji, we followed a dirt road through vivid green rice paddies, cotton fields and melon patches sprawling between the brown foothills of the Karkar and Choghsang mountains. On either side of a narrow bridge, over turbulent water that tumbled the bloated carcass of a large animal, several local police officers stood in mismatched ensembles of traditional dress and government-issued uniforms, manning two shoddy fortifications made from sandbags and plywood. Recognizing Pir Muhammad, they let us pass.

Haq’s compound wasn’t far from there. When we arrived, a group of villagers were lounging under a canopy, hashing out a disagreement over water rights and watching an old TV with a ceramic eagle perched on top. Compared with the elders, the middle-aged Haq looked unexceptional and unassuming: dark and sinewy with shaggy black hair, unadorned by turban, vest or weapon. As he led us to a private room with diaphanous pink curtains, I noticed a scorpion tattooed on his arm. “Two years ago, this whole area was under Taliban control,” Haq said as we reclined on large cushions, forgoing, because of Ramadan, the customary tea. Like the rest of him, Haq’s voice was unexpectedly small but tense, carrying a threat of excitability, as if something in him were coiled and ready to spring.

He described how, before he and his comrades routed them, the Taliban roamed freely and occupied families’ homes and hanged recalcitrant villagers in the trees. Most were foreign or from other provinces, and to recruit local allies they relied on a campaign of violence and intimidation. Haq said that after several attacks on his home, he requested assistance from the governor and provincial chief of police, who “bluntly told me they couldn’t help me.” Rather than capitulate to the Taliban, Haq joined the Hezb-i-Islami insurgent movement led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. “I decided to take up arms against the provincial government in Pul-i-Khumri because they were not providing us with protection against the Taliban,” he explained.

This might be true — Haq might have joined one insurgent group, reluctantly, only to defend himself against another — or it might be as good an example as any of the ubiquitous myth-making in Afghanistan, where personal narratives must often be rewritten to reflect an ever-shifting landscape of allegiances and adversaries. Whatever his motives, over the next two years, Haq and his fellow Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (H.I.G.) insurgents fought a series of turf battles with the Taliban until, eventually, the government offered them protection in exchange for disarmament. He agreed, but after six months in a safe house in Pul-i-Khumri, he said, “we decided we needed to have our weapons back and return to our villages.”

When Haq returned to Shahabuddin, the fighting resumed, culminating last fall in a Taliban siege of the compounds he and his outmatched men were occupying. “There were more than 500 Taliban,” Haq said, “and only about 30 of us. I was able to get to the Pul-i-Khumri government and ask for help. The chief of police kept making excuses. Consequently, I went to the Americans.” About a month earlier, a small U.S. Special Forces team arrived in Shahabuddin, and when Haq appealed to them, he said, “right away they decided to help me.” The ensuing battle lasted four days, ending when the Americans called for heavy air support. Seven of Haq’s men were killed, and with the endorsement and facilitation of the Special Forces, those who survived became Shahabuddin’s local police. No major confrontation with the Taliban has happened since.

When I mentioned the complaints of criminal abuse, Haq, with a shrug of annoyance, also chalked them up to Tajik machinations. “It is obvious,” he said. “We were able to stop some of the corruption in the government. They were benefiting from our insecurity.” He gestured at the elders gathered outside. “They don’t like people resolving their problems in the traditional way. They would like to see these people standing in their doorways, offering them bribes.” He added: “The Pul-i-Khumri government is no good. If the American forces leave today, the Pul-i-Khumri government will probably do us more harm than the Taliban.”

To speak with government officials in Pul-i-Khumri about the A.L.P. is to glimpse the wilderness of ethnic and political hostilities that makes outside intervention so challenging. One of the most vociferous critics of the program is the head of the provincial council, Rasoul Khan. Probably more than any other individual, he is responsible for the Tajik power grab in Baghlan after 2001, and the marginalization of the Pashtuns that followed. He has been accused of seizing Pashtun lands, running drugs and brutally dispensing with his enemies. “He has his own subcommanders, who are using government facilities, police vehicles, police uniforms,” Hewad, of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said. “After the fall of the Taliban, this man, who was in the trenches against them, came to the government with a huge amount of his fighters and militias from the mountains.” The senior Special Forces sergeant in Baghlan told me: “Rasoul Khan is one of the most crooked dudes you’ll ever meet. He’s got so many connections, all the way to the president himself. He can literally order a hit on anybody he wants.”

At the Provincial Council building in Pul-i-Khumri, I found Rasoul Khan surrounded by a retinue of hardy-looking Tajiks, who nodded in agreement with everything he said. “As the representatives of the people, we are against the establishment of the A.L.P.,” he insisted. “The danger of the A.L.P. is much worse than the Taliban. The people becoming members are all criminals. They’ve killed at least nine people so far.”

Others dismiss these objections as self-serving. In his heavily guarded office above a hectic commercial street in downtown Pul-i-Khumri, a council member named Moh Faisal told me that the A.L.P. was anathema to Rasoul Khan because it represented a Pashtun threat to the Tajik hegemony over which he presided. “In the past, he was involved in drug trafficking and killed lots of people,” Faisal said. “Now all his relatives, friends and associates are in the government. The national police in Baghlan are not accountable to the chief of police. They are accountable to Rasoul Khan.”

Nearly everyone in Pul-i-Khumri seemed to agree with this. The provincial police chief at the time, Brig. Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahimi, was a Pashtun; the fact that the vast majority of his men were Andarabi Tajiks rendered him largely ineffectual, his authority mostly nominal. Not long after speaking with Faisal, I visited Rahimi in his opulent Pul-i-Khumri office, where each wall was lined with plush leather couches on which petitioners could wait to be invited into a much smaller and less stately room for private conversation. When it was my turn to see the general, he said: “An area that could not be secured by 500 national policemen is secured by 50 A.L.P. But what is really important is that the A.L.P. must be regulated.” Ultimately, that regulation should come from the chief of police. But the general claimed that the Americans had hampered his ability to do his job and that U.S. Special Forces protected A.L.P. commanders from criminal investigations. “The rules say the local police must be under the direct supervision of the national police,” Rahimi said. “Our friends in the Special Forces must not intervene in this.” Toward the end of our conversation, his cellphone rang. After listening to the other line for several moments, and perhaps forgetting my recorder was on, he said in Dari: “All three of them must be here for the investigation. Otherwise, the investigation cannot proceed.”

Rahimi was speaking of Nur-ul Haq, his younger brother Faz-ul Haq and their cousin Abdur Rahman. On later trips to Shahabuddin, I spent time with Faz-ul Haq and Rahman (who Human Rights Watch, in a recent report, says is accused of raping a 13-year-old boy), visiting A.L.P. checkpoints and accompanying foot patrols. As we made our way through verdant farmland irrigated by hand-dug canals, Faz-ul Haq seemed to have a story for each compound and cotton field we passed: here had been a Taliban headquarters, here a bloody firefight, here an R.P.G. attack. At his checkpoint in Omarkhel village, Rahman told me that as bad as it had sometimes been in Shahabuddin, he had only made the 20-minute drive to Pul-i-Khumri twice during the last year. “They were terrorizing us, stealing from us,” he said of the Taliban. But the Tajiks in the capital “are stronger than the Taliban,” he said.

“They never want to come,” General Rahimi now said into the phone, impatiently. “They are evading it by various means.” When he hung up, I asked whom he’d been talking to. He said it was the U.S. Special Forces. The general was no doubt affected by Ramadan and the day’s long fast, but he looked and sounded like a man overwhelmed by competing influences. “The Special Forces must hand these guys over,” he said. “If they don’t, it will jeopardize the entire program.”

The commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces in northern Afghanistan calls Rahimi’s characterization “an absolute lie.” When we spoke, he stressed that it lay with Rahimi, not the Americans, to investigate complaints and make arrests. “I’m not here to defend Nur-ul Haq,” he said. “But what I do know is I’ve seen a string of baseless allegations that when we followed up couldn’t be substantiated.” The leader of the Special Forces team working in Shahabuddin told me that he had personally escorted Haq to see criminal investigators in Pul-i-Khumri. “If they want to arrest him, they can arrest him,” he said.“We’re not going to stop them in any way.” In fact, it makes sense that Rahimi would want to give an impression of disapproving of Haq (thereby appeasing certain Tajiks in the provincial government), while also refraining from arresting him (which might result in Haq’s removal and risk upsetting the precarious stability Shahabuddin now enjoys). Accusing American Special Forces of obstructionism would afford the general a convenient means of doing both.

All the same, whatever forces might influence Rahimi’s actions, or lack thereof, the allegations remain. “If they are true, obviously Nur-ul Haq won’t be an A.L.P. commander,” the Special Forces team leader told me. The problem, he said, was that no accusers had come forward, which only fed suspicions of Tajik subterfuge. I mentioned what a villager had told me: “We are too afraid to raise any complaints against the local police. If we complain in the day, they will come in the night to take us from our homes. If they capture somebody, they tell the Americans he is Taliban.” I also repeated the claim of the elders who said that more than 100 families had left Shahabuddin since Haq took control. If true, wasn’t this evidence enough of mistreatment? The team leader acknowledged that many villagers had moved to the city. But here, too, the story was more complicated than it seemed. Before Haq joined the government, residents of Shahabuddin were obliged to ally with one of two insurgent groups — H.I.G. or the Taliban — and bitter grievances endured between those who chose differently. When the Taliban controlled Shahabuddin, supporters of Haq were forced to flee to the city; last year, when Haq returned and ousted the Taliban, many of those who stayed did the same. “Whether they’re innocent or not, they have this Taliban association,” the Special Forces team leader said. “And then the other families that are in the area have the H.I.G. association. And either way, they despise each other.”

At the end of the day, the team leader said, the situation in Baghlan was enormously complicated, and you never truly knew whom to believe. “We’re really trying to do the right thing,” he said. “One of my intelligence sergeants said it the right way: ‘Everybody in some way or form is a bad guy here. So you just have to pick the people who are less bad than others to work with you.’ ” The Special Operations commander in northern Afghanistan agrees. “Given the guy’s background, he’s clearly not an angel,” he said of Haq. “We struggle with it. He’s an imperfect solution. If not him, then who?”

About a month after I first visited Baghlan Province, the long-simmering antipathy between its local police and the Pul-i-Khumri national police finally erupted in violence. According to several Afghans and Americans involved, one of Haq’s local police officers, a man named Sher Muhammad, was in Pul-i-Khumri on the last day of Ramadan when he was told that a relative, a 15-year-old boy named Humayun, was being used for sex by a powerful national police colonel — a Tajik from Andarab.

Enraged, Sher drove directly to a highway checkpoint in the middle of a busy bazaar that was commanded by the colonel, whose name is Ghani, and demanded to know where Humayun was. The guards at the checkpoint told him it was none of his business. Sher went to his truck and got his rifle. When he returned to the checkpoint and insisted on seeing Humayun, Colonel Ghani ordered his men to shoot. A national police officer named Mestaray put two bullets in Sher’s leg.

Abdul Halim, an Afghan Special Forces sergeant, happened to be passing through the bazaar in his truck. When I met with him, Sergeant Halim said that as he approached the national police checkpoint, “I saw Sher lying on the ground, and a man in civilian clothes hitting him in the face with an AK-47.” Halim stopped, disarmed Mestaray and helped the bloodied Sher across the road. Mestaray fled into a fortified compound where Colonel Ghani’s battalion quartered. By this time, a crowd had gathered. “While I was trying to get the crowd off the road, I saw a national police officer pointing his gun at Sher,” Halim recounted. “I said: ‘Don’t shoot him. He’s already shot.’ He didn’t listen. He opened fire and shot Sher a couple of times in the back.” Sher collapsed, and the gunman retreated into the same building as Mestaray.

An ambulance arrived to take Sher to the hospital, and shortly thereafter more armed men came onto the scene: the deputy chief of police, additional soldiers from the Afghan Special Forces, about 10 U.S. Special Forces soldiers and a large group of Afghan Local Police officers. As the Afghan and U.S. Special Forces tried to separate the national and local police, the ambulance returned to the scene with Sher’s corpse, riddled with eight bullets. At this point, the American team leader, who was also there, told me, “It really started getting out of control.” The Americans managed to persuade the A.L.P. to attend to Sher’s body while they tried to retrieve Colonel Ghani. They then followed behind an Afghan Special Forces team led by Master Sgt. Bilal Ahmed Sheenwari. Sheenwari later told me that when he reached the national-police compound, he found Colonel Ghani and nine other police guarding the front gate. “I told Ghani, ‘We need the guys who attacked Sher,’ ” and here the colonel again ordered his men to open fire. A chaotic gun battle ensued between the Afghan Special Forces and Afghan national police. Sheenwari said the police officers fired on them with AK-47’s, PK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. “We received fire, too,” the American team leader said. “All the Americans almost got hit with R.P.G.’s. It was a pretty hectic 15 minutes. There were civilians everywhere. There were A.N.P., A.L.P., A.S.F.” He called for air support, and soon an F-16 and an Apache helicopter joined the fray. “We got a personal phone call from Lt. Gen. Baba Jan” — the national police commander for northern Afghanistan — “telling us please don’t kill everybody out there. That’s what stopped us from doing anymore.”

Colonel Ghani and two other men were wounded. But Ghani, Mestaray and the officer who killed Sher have all since disappeared. The U.S. Special Forces and A.L.P. believe that Rasoul Khan evacuated them from the compound via a back road and is now concealing their whereabouts. When I later asked him whether he knew where Ghani was, Rasoul Kahn said Ghani was taken to India for medical treatment — a story the U.S. Special Forces are convinced is untrue.

Humayun, the boy, has vanished as well. No one knows if he’s alive or dead, but the A.L.P. are eager for retribution. When I asked the Special Forces team leader if he was worried about what might still result from the unresolved conflict, he said: “Yes. Very much so.”

Proponents and critics of the A.L.P., when arguing its merits or its faults, each invoke Afghanistan’s long history of irregular armed groups and diffuse, localized power dynamics. “Our idea was to use the Musahiban dynasty as a model,” Seth Jones, a former senior Cfsocc adviser, told me when I met with him near his office at the RAND Corporation in Washington. Encompassing the rule of Nadir Shah, Zahir Shah and Daoud Kahn, the Musahiban dynasty extended from 1929 until the communist coup of 1978, a period of relative peace often referred to as Afghanistan’s golden age. Jones argues that Nadir Shah and his successors were able to achieve such stability “because they understood the importance of local power” and refrained from trying to displace it.

Critics of the A.L.P. point to a different precedent. The senior Afghan government official who views local police as “poison” in the long term, for example, also told me: “Look at our history, especially the mujahedeen, and you see that the A.L.P. is the wrong program for our country. People are very tired here. Why did the people accept the Taliban? Most Afghans are not extremists. But they were tired of the militias, the mujahedeen.” For Afghans who see the local police as potentially uncontrollable, the strategy represents a distressing step backward, not toward the Musahibans but the chaos that came later, during the anarchic ’90s, when warlords and militias terrorized the country. Far from a golden age, this period is often called topakiyaan — “the time of the men with guns.”

In a country as fragmented as Afghanistan, no strategy can be expected to succeed or fail uniformly on a national scale, especially one, like the Afghan Local Police, that targets not the province or the district but the village. As problematic as the program has become amid the ethnic melee of the north, the majority of A.L.P. sites are concentrated in the south, where a comparatively homogenous Pashtun population has proved more hospitable. One of the earliest A.L.P. locations in southern Afghanistan was Kandahar’s Arghandab District. Last summer, as part of President Obama’s surge, American troops in Arghandab waged some of the most intense fighting of the war, dislodging large numbers of Taliban and winning a tenuous peace that the A.L.P. and the national police must now work together to maintain.

Before the surge, a Taliban checkpoint blocked the entrance to an area in Arghandab called Tabin, and villagers were regularly hanged from the trees that shade the slow-moving river there. Today, a local police headquarters stands around the bend, and Nesar Ahmed, an intense young man with a prosthetic right leg, commands 16 motley irregulars, whose Kalashnikovs are plastered with brightly colored stickers and wrapped in psychedelic fabric and turquoise beads. Nine months ago, Nesar told me, “this entire area had turned into a hell.” Now farmers can travel to Kandahar City from Tabin during the harvests, and they can irrigate their crops at night, when it is cool. “They’ve already sold the fruit in their trees,” he said, waving at the pomegranate orchards up the road.

Nesar is a cousin of Muhammad Issak, an ascendant personality in Arghandab, who functions both as Tabin’s malik, or chief, and as its national police commander. When I met with Issak in Tabin, he was just returning from the funeral of a local tribal elder who was killed by Taliban assassins two days earlier in Kandahar City. Light-skinned and thin almost to the point of frailty, Issak affects a groomed mustache rather than a beard, and favors a sidearm discreetly holstered beneath his plaid vest; a gold watch hangs loosely from his small wrist. In an unlit room just wide enough to accommodate two bunk beds, Issak sat on the bottom mattress, one leg draped effetely on the other, while Nesar and his men crouched around him on the floor, nodding at his words.

The son of a mullah and a former teacher, Issak enlisted with the national police during the Taliban resurgence in 2006. Last year, after rising to the rank of company commander in Kandahar City, he brought 90 of his officers back to Tabin, where they set up checkpoints in six different villages, and Issak promptly began working with U.S. Special Operations Forces to establish the A.L.P. “I asked the people to send their youth,” Issak said. “Every clan from the seven mosques sent two or three of their boys.”

The boys included a teenager in an ill-fitting brown uniform, another sporting leather ammo pouches over a bright red T-shirt, a third with a purple scarf tied around his head, Rambo-style, and an older man whose long black beard showed the first wisps of gray. They all appeared timorous and awkward, still unused to their status as armed men. I asked the older one why he joined the A.L.P. “We could not take care of our orchards and fields because there was fighting in them,” he said. “There were I.E.D.’s in every field and roadway. I joined when I felt there was a need for me to bring security to my area. I want to go back to my field.”

Down the road from Tabin, past labyrinthine ruins of old, mud-walled compounds, through lush fields of okra and low-growing vineyards, a collection of villages called Nagahan has been a focal point for U.S. Special Operations Forces since before the advent of the A.L.P. The local police commander, Muhammad Nabi, distinguished himself throughout Arghandab during the jihad against the Soviet Union, but later fled Afghanistan under Taliban rule and was pushing a handcart around Quetta, Pakistan, scraping by as a street vendor, when he heard of plans to recapture Kandahar with the help of American forces in late 2001. He returned to join the fight, then laid down his arms; two years ago, the U.S. military gave them back, under the Community Defense Initiative. “I did not want it,” Nabi told me, “but they insisted that I take the lead here.”

At that time, there were 10 Taliban checkpoints in Nagahan. “We liberated this area from them in one year,” Nabi told me. A few days later, I met with a yellow-toothed elder named Meera Jan, who shared fond memories of fighting alongside Nabi before the surge and the A.L.P. When I asked him what their force was like then — how were they organized? what sorts of resources did they have access to? — Meera Jan reached into his kameez and brought out a filth-encrusted elastic belt, the reflective kind U.S. soldiers wear when jogging on military bases. He held it up for me to admire, as if its properties were magical, and explained that in lieu of uniforms, an American officer had distributed the belts to distinguish the armed villagers from insurgents.

“We defended our area with this belt,” Meera Jan said.

By last June, Nabi’s militia had grown sufficiently effective to incite the Taliban to an act of desperation. Several hundred people were celebrating the marriage of a local couple when a stranger intruded, wrapped in a shawl. Nabi was a few feet away when the man detonated himself. The blast was devastating, and though Nabi escaped with minor shrapnel wounds and a ruptured eardrum, scores were killed, many of them women and children. (News reports at the time put the toll at 40; everyone I spoke with in Nagahan said 85.) One of the wedding guests, a man named Noorullah, told me a story I hadn’t heard from anyone else — that before reaching the ceremony, the bomber stopped to ask a local boy where exactly it was being held. Noorullah claimed the boy embraced the man in greeting and felt some pieces of metal attached to his arms and back. He followed him to the wedding, and when they arrived, the boy asked one of the commanders for a gun, intending to kill the bomber. Assuming the boy was up to mischief, the commander refused. “By the time he made others understand, it was too late,” Noorullah said. He told this story very slowly and very quietly, and when he finished he added: “The bomber blew himself up in front of me. My children were killed.”

The victims are buried in several mass graves, marked by the colored flags reserved for martyrs. The attack galvanized the community against the Taliban. Such unanimous resolve is just one of several preconditions that have made parts of Arghandab uniquely suited to the A.L.P. — but that are also often lacking elsewhere in Afghanistan. Before I left the district, the chief elder for Naghan’s 20-member shura, who said he lost 20 relatives in the wedding attack, told me: “The locals are with Nabi. The shura has appointed him, and the people will continue to support him, with or without the Americans.”

The vast differences between the A.L.P. in Kandahar and Baghlan underscore the vexing nature of a war that varies profoundly from district to district, village to village. While members of the local and national police in Arghandab are literally family, in Pul-i-Khumri they seem destined for bloodshed. A week after Sher Muhammad was murdered, Pashtun elders in Baghlan Province convened a shura to discuss possible courses of action. More than 1,000 men attended. One result was a list of seven demands submitted to the governor, the last of which was that Rasoul Khan “be brought to justice” for “multiple crimes,” including hiding Colonel Ghani and the national police officers who shot Sher Muhammad. The petition assigned one week for a satisfactory response, at which point the Pashtuns would block the two main roads into Pul-i-Khumri.

The day before the deadline, I returned to Baghlan and met with Rasoul Khan, who spoke ominously about the local police. “If the government does not control the irresponsible actions of the A.L.P.,” he said, “many such clashes can happen in the future.” At the end of our meeting, he told me that the Tajiks of Andarab were holding their own council, in response to the Pashtun shura. I followed him as he led a small entourage of armed men out of the provincial council building to a massive tent under which several hundred Tajiks sat in plastic chairs and on carpets and cushions, listening to Mustafa Mohsini, Rasoul Khan’s older brother. “The local police have created chaos in the area that nobody can solve,” Mohsini intoned in a deep, sonorous voice. “They do whatever they want. They incite ethnic rifts. They are threatening our people and our tribe.”

The following morning, I visited Haq again in Shahabuddin. When I mentioned the gathering of Andarabis in the capital, he nodded in irritation. “We know about it,” he said. “They have invited a few Pashtuns who have collaborated with them in the past. I told them: ‘You are not allowed to go there. If you want to go, talk instead to your hat and ask it when you want to die, because I will kill you.’ ”

In the end, the Pashtun demonstration was postponed a week, and then indefinitely, to allow a period of mourning for Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan whose assassination in Kabul on Sept. 20 made the future of the country that much more uncertain. Five days later, General Rahimi was replaced as provincial chief of police by Asadullah Sherzad, who is also Pashtun. “It’s definitely showing right now that Rasoul Khan is trying to get to him,” the Special Forces team leader recently told me. When I asked what Sherzad was doing about the investigation into Nur-ul Haq, Faz-ul Haq and Abdur Rahman, he said: “It seems to have kind of gone away. He just said, ‘I trust the Special Forces not to incorporate criminals.’ ”

Envisioned as a two- to five-year program, the Afghan Local Police are eventually supposed to be subsumed by the National Security Forces. But if the Interior Ministry does disband the A.L.P. at some future point, what will become of its members? Brig. Gen. Jefforey Smith, until last month the NATO deputy commander for police training in Afghanistan, told me that the A.L.P. will not be required to meet the National Security Forces’ recruiting goals. He also said, “By and large, a lot of them don’t want to join the national services and be at risk of having to move away from their villages.” I asked what happens, then, when the program is terminated and there are suddenly 30,000 armed, trained and organized Afghans scattered throughout the country, unwilling or unable to enlist with the national forces but also no longer employed by the A.L.P. “That’s the $64 million question,” General Smith said. “In theory, the improvement of security over time creates opportunity for improved governance and economic development, and with that you have other employment opportunities that don’t exist today.”

In Arghandab, when I asked Cmdr. Muhammad Nabi what he would do if the A.L.P. were discontinued, he replied that if at that point the national police and the army were capable of providing adequate protection for his village, “it is not a problem with us to have the A.L.P. disarmed. We will return to cultivating ladyfingers. We will take out our tractors and start farming.” Asked the same question in Shahabuddin, Haq said: “That decision will be made by the elders. If they make the decision to turn in our weapons, we will gladly turn them in to the Afghan government.” Then he thought for a moment and added: “But not to the government in Pul-i-Khumri. As long as the government in Pul-i-Khumri remains the way it is now — an Andarabi organization — we are going to protect ourselves however we can.”

Moises Saman for The New York Times

October 20, 2011

 

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who ruled Libya for 42 years, died Thursday as his last stronghold fell to the Libyan forces who drove him from power, officials of Libya’s transitional government said. There were conflicting initial reports of the specific circumstances of his death: some said he was killed in Surt, his hometown; others said he died while fleeing it.

Colonel Qaddafi, 69, was an erratic, provocative dictator with the wardrobe and looks befitting an aging rock star. To thwart potential rivals at home, he sanctioned spasms of grisly violence and frequent bedlam, while on the world stage he sought to leverage his nation’s immense oil wealth into an outsized personal role.

He anointed himself with a string of titles over the years: “the brother leader,” “the guide to the era of the masses,” “the king of kings of Africa” and — his most preferred — “the leader of the revolution.”

But the labels pinned on him by others tended to stick the most. President Ronald Reagan called him “the mad dog of the Middle East.” President Anwar el-Sadat of neighboring Egypt pronounced him “the crazy Libyan.”

Even in the last months, he refused to countenance the fact that the country he had ruled as a dictator had turned against him, telling interviewers, “All my people love me.”

He appeared to maintain that attitude to the end. In one of his last messages, issued as a fugitive in the months after Tripoli fell and broadcast on Syrian television (he had lost control of the Libyan airwaves), he said his downfall was a Western conspiracy that could be reversed by his Libyan supporters. “The people of Libya, the true Libyans, will never accept invasion and colonization,” he said. “We will fight for our freedom and we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.”

Colonel Qaddafi was a 27-year-old junior officer when he led the bloodless coup that deposed Libya’s monarch in 1969. Soon afterward, he began styling himself a desert nomad philosopher. He received dignitaries in his signature sprawling white tent, which he erected wherever he went: Rome, Paris and, after much controversy, New York, on a Westchester estate in 2009. Inside, its quilted walls might be printed with traditional motifs like palm trees and camels or embroidered with his own sayings.

Colonel Qaddafi declared that his political system of permanent revolution would sweep away capitalism and socialism. But he hedged his bets by financing and arming a cornucopia of violent organizations, including the Irish Republican Army and African guerrilla groups, and he became an international pariah after his government was linked to deadly terrorist attacks, particularly the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.

After the American-led invasion of Iraq, Colonel Qaddafi announced that Libya was abandoning its efforts to acquire unconventional weapons, including a covert nascent nuclear program, ushering in a new era of relations with the West. But in Libya, he ruled through an ever smaller circle of advisers, including his sons, and continued to destroy any institution that might challenge him.

By the time he was done, Libya had no parliament, no unified military command, no political parties, no unions, no civil society and no nongovernmental organizations. His ministries were hollow, with the notable exception of the state oil company.

Tight Grip on Power

Eight years into his rule, he renamed the country the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Jamahiriya. (Jamahiriya was his Arabic translation for a state of the masses.) “In the era of the masses, power is in the hands of the people themselves and leaders disappear forever,” he wrote in The Green Book, a three-volume political tract that was required reading in every school.

For decades, Libyans noted dryly that he did not seem to be disappearing any time soon; he became the longest-serving Arab or African leader. Yet he always presented himself as beloved guide and chief clairvoyant, rather than ruler. Indeed, he seethed when a popular uprising inspired by similar revolutions next door in Tunisia and Egypt first sought to drive him from power.

“I am a glory that Libya cannot forgo and the Libyan people cannot forgo, nor the Arab nation, nor the Islamic nation, nor Africa, nor Latin America, nor all the nations that desire freedom and human dignity and resist tyranny!” Colonel Qaddafi shouted in February. “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution!”

It was a typically belligerent and random harangue. He vowed to fight until his last drop of blood.

“This is my country!” he roared as he shook his fist and pounded the lectern. “Muammar is not a president to quit his post. Muammar is the leader of the revolution until the end of time!”

He blamed his usual bogeymen — including drugs, the United States and Osama bin Laden — for the rebellion. But he also made it clear that he was ready to hunt house by house to eliminate anyone who participated. “Everything will burn,” he vowed.

Systematic Terror

At least once a decade, Colonel Qaddafi fomented shocking violence that both terrorized and intimidated Libyans.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he eliminated even mild critics through public trials and executions. Kangaroo courts were staged on soccer fields or basketball courts, where each of the accused was interrogated, often urinating in fear as he begged for his life while the crowd howled for execution. The events were televised to make sure that no Libyan missed the point.

The bodies of one group of students hanged in downtown Tripoli’s main square were left there to rot for a week, opposition figures said, and traffic was rerouted to force cars to pass by.

In the 1990s, faced with growing Islamist opposition, Colonel Qaddafi bombed towns in eastern Libya, and his henchmen were widely believed to have opened fire on prisoners in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison, killing about 1,200.

“Qaddafi’s ability to have survived so long rests on his convenient position in not being committed to a single ideology and his use of violence in such a theatrical way,” said Hisham Matar, the author of “In the Country of Men,” a novel that depicts the devastation of normal life under Colonel Qaddafi. “He deliberately tried to create a campaign that would terrorize the population, that would traumatize them to such an extent that they would never think of expressing their thoughts politically or socially.”

Colonel Qaddafi survived countless coup and assassination attempts and cracked down harshly afterward, alienating important Libyan tribes. He imported soldiers from his misadventures in places like Sudan, Chad and Liberia, transforming Libya’s ragtag militias into what he styled as his African or Islamic legions..

A Rapid Rise

By all accounts, Muammar el-Qaddafi was born to illiterate Bedouin parents in a tent just inland from the coastal town of Surt in 1942. (Some sources give the date as June 7.) His father herded camels and sheep. One grandfather was killed in the 1911 Italian invasion to colonize Libya.

His parents scrimped for his education, first with a local cleric and then secondary school. There he began to idolize President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who preached Arab unity and socialism after deposing the king in a 1952 coup. He showed enough promise to enter the Royal Military Academy at Benghazi, in eastern Libya, and in 1966 was sent to England for a course on military communications. He learned English.

On Sept. 1, 1969, he led a group of young officers — many, like him, from the signal corps — in seizing the government in just a few hours while King Idris was abroad. They dissolved Parliament and set up a 12-member Revolutionary Command Council to rule Libya, mirroring Mr. Nasser’s Egypt. He was promoted to colonel and armed forces commander. His military rank stuck with him in later years, though he would rebuke interviewers who addressed him as colonel and would dismiss all Arab armies as a joke. Egypt was Colonel Qaddafi’s blueprint, and he proclaimed that the newly named Libyan Arab Republic would advance under the Arab nationalist slogan “Socialism, unity and freedom.”

Yet in a country where the deposed king, Idris, had come from a long line of religious figures (they headed the Senussi order of Sufi Islam), Colonel Qaddafi felt compelled to shore up his Islamic credentials. He banned alcohol and closed bars, nightclubs and casinos. He outlawed teaching English in public schools. Traffic signs and advertisements not in Arabic were painted over.

Decades later, only one nightclub had opened in all of Tripoli, housed in a nondescript building plastered with revolutionary slogans and displaying the mandatory picture of the leader, who seemed to stare down from every wall in Libya.

Colonel Qaddafi claimed that Mr. Nasser had declared him his son, and in the early years of his rule, he set about trying to win his idol’s approval by modernizing Libya and trying, in vain, to unite it with other Arab countries. He expelled American and British military bases, then nationalized the property of Italian settlers and a small Jewish community. He railed against Israel and Zionism.

He also vowed to eliminate Libya’s tribes, worried that they were too powerful, even though Libya’s urbanizing population had been moving away from them for some time.

Libya had been desperately poor until oil was discovered in 1959. A decade later, Libyans had touched little of their wealth.

The 1969 coup changed that. The new Libyan government forced the major oil companies to cede majority stakes in exchange for continued access to the country’s oil fields, and it demanded a greater share of the profits. The pattern was emulated across the oil-producing states, profoundly changing their relationship with the oil giants.

With the increased revenue, Colonel Qaddafi set about building roads, hospitals, schools and housing. And Libyans, who had suffered during the Italian occupation before World War II, were allowed to celebrate an anticolonial, Arab-nationalist sentiment that had been bottled up under the monarchy, said Prof. Ali Ahmida, an expert on the colonial period who teaches at the University of New England.

Life expectancy, which averaged 51 years in 1969, is now over 74. Literacy leapt to 88 percent. Per capita annual income grew to above $12,000 in recent years, though the figure is markedly lower than that found in many oil-rich countries. Yet Colonel Qaddafi warned his people that the oil would not last.

“Petroleum societies are lazy everywhere,” he observed. “People are used to having more money and want everything available. This revolution wants to change this life and to promote production and work, to produce everything by our hands. But the people are lazy.”

Guiding Philosophy

The mercurial changes in policy and personality that kept Libyans off balance began in earnest with the three volumes of his Green Book, published from 1976 to 1979. (Green, he explained, was for both Islam and agriculture.) The book offered his “third universal theory” to improve on capitalism and socialism, and elevated the mundane to the allegedly profound, condemning sports like boxing as barbarism and pointing out that men and women are different because women menstruate.

Colonel Qaddafi also introduced Orwellian revolutionary committees in every neighborhood to purge the country of the ideologically unsound, calling it “people power.” He began foisting social experiments on Libyans.

Once he demanded that all Libyans raise chickens to promote food self-sufficiency, and even deducted the costs of the cages from their wages. “It made no sense to raise chickens in apartments,” said Mansour O. El-Kikhia, a Qaddafi biographer at the University of Texas and a member of a famous opposition family. “People slaughtered the chickens, ate them and used the cages as dish racks.”

Colonel Qaddafi said women were not equal to men because they were biologically different, but he nevertheless exhibited them as a symbol of the success of the Libyan revolution. None had a higher profile than his phalanx of female bodyguards, who wore camouflage fatigues, red nail polish and high-heeled sandals, and carried submachine guns.

To consolidate his power, Colonel Qaddafi tried to eliminate or isolate all of the 11 other members of the original Revolutionary Command Council. Strikes or unauthorized news reports resulted in prison sentences, and illegal political activity was punishable by death. Western books were burned, and private enterprise was banned. Libyan intelligence agents engaged in all manner of skulduggery, reaching overseas to kidnap and assassinate opponents.

On the economic front, he vowed to turn Libya into an agriculture powerhouse through the Great Man-Made River, a grandiose $20 billion project to pump water from aquifers underneath the Sahara and send it over 1,200 miles to the coast through a gargantuan pipeline.

Meanwhile he was cementing Libya’s rogue-state status by bankrolling terrorist and guerrilla organizations, including Abu Nidal, the radical Palestinian organization, and the violent Red Army Faction in Europe. At least a dozen coups or coup attempts in Africa were traced to his backing.

That set him on a collision course with the West.

In the early 1980s, President Reagan closed the Libyan Embassy in Washington, suspended oil imports and shot down two Libyan fighters after Colonel Qaddafi tried to extend Libya’s territorial waters across the Gulf of Sidra.

In London in 1984, gunshots from the Libyan People’s Bureau, as the embassy was called, killed a police officer and wounded 11 demonstrators. In April 1986, Libyan agents were linked to the bombing of the disco La Belle in West Berlin, killing two American service members and a Turkish woman and wounding 200 people.

President Reagan retaliated 10 days later by bombing targets in Libya, including Colonel Qaddafi’s residence in his compound at the Bab al-Aziziya barracks in Tripoli.

He preserved the wreckage of the house as a symbol of American treachery and, in front of it, installed a sculpture of a giant fist crushing an American jet fighter. The wreckage became his preferred stage for major events; his major speech during the 2011 uprising was delivered from the first floor.

It was also during the ’80s that Colonel Qaddafi invaded Chad to claim territory for Libya after encroaching on its border in the south for years. Chad finally defeated the effort in 1987 with French and American military aid.

The Lockerbie Bombing

In 1988, in the deadliest terrorist act linked to Libya, 259 people aboard Pan Am Flight 103 died when the plane exploded in midair over Lockerbie. The falling wreckage killed 11 people on the ground. Libyan agents were also believed to have been behind the explosion of a French passenger jet over Niger in 1989, killing 170 people.

Nearly a decade of international isolation started in 1992, after Libya refused to hand over two suspects who had been indicted by the United States and Britain in the Lockerbie bombing. France also sought four suspects in the Niger bombing, among them Abdullah Senussi, a brother-in-law of Colonel Qaddafi’s and the head of external intelligence. He was convicted in absentia.

The United Nations imposed economic sanctions, and when his fellow Arabs enforced them, Colonel Qaddafi turned away from the Arab world. He began his quest to become leader of Africa, coming closest in title, at least, in 2009, when he was named the chairman of the African Union for a year.

In 1999, Libya finally handed over two Lockerbie suspects for trial in The Hague under Scottish law and reached a financial settlement with the French. One suspect was acquitted but another, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in a Scottish jail. When the government released him in 2009, on the grounds that he was terminally ill, the outcry was strong and swift. The British were accused of trying to curry favor with Tripoli for oil and arms deals.

The international sanctions against Libya were lifted in 2003 after it accepted responsibility for the bombing and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of victims in the Lockerbie bombing and in other attacks.

The Libyans did not admit guilt, however. They made it clear that in agreeing to the payment they were simply taking a practical step toward restoring ties with the West. But when Judge Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the justice minister, defected during the popular uprising in February 2011, he told a Swedish newspaper that he had proof that Colonel Qaddafi had ordered the operation.

Restoring Western Ties

Tripoli truly began to emerge from the cold after the September 2001 attacks against the United States by Al Qaeda. Colonel Qaddafi condemned them and shared Libya’s own intelligence on the organization with Washington. Libya had been the first country to demand an international arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden.

Colonel Qaddafi also said he would cooperate with the international community in destroying its weapons stockpile. President George W. Bush said Libya’s decision demonstrated the success of the invasion, in that it had persuaded a rogue state to abandon its menacing ways, although Libya had made a similar overture years before and many experts did not consider its programs threatening.

Nevertheless, Britain and the United States re-established diplomatic relations. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a parade of world leaders to Colonel Qaddafi’s tent seeking trade deals. Ms. Rice was the first American secretary of state to visit since 1953.

Before the visit, Colonel Qaddafi was effusive about Ms. Rice. “I support my darling black African woman,” he said on the network Al Jazeera, adding, “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders. Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza — I love her very much.”

State Department cables released by WikiLeaks suggested that there was another woman who had won Colonel Qaddafi’s affection, and confidence — a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse, described as the senior member of a posse of nurses around him.

The cables described him as a hypochondriac who feared flying over water and who often fasted twice a week. He followed horse racing, loved flamenco dancing and added “king of culture” to his myriad titles, the cables said.

Around 1995 he published a collection of short stories and essays called “The Village, the City, the Suicide of the Astronaut and Other Stories.” It later came out in Britain as “Escape to Hell and Other Stories.” The introduction, by a Libyan author, called it a “modern novel,” but as a reviewer in the British newspaper The Guardian put it: “There are no characters, no twists, no subtle illuminations; indeed, there is precious little narrative. Instead, you get surreal rants and bizarre streams of consciousness obviously unmolested by the hand of any editor.”

Family Life

Colonel Qaddafi married at least twice. His oldest son, Mohammed, from his first marriage, became a businessman and the agent for foreign companies working in Libya.

Seven other children — six sons and a daughter — came from his marriage to Safia Farkash, a former nurse. Seif al-Islam, the oldest son, had been the face of modern Libya, establishing an international charity and forever pledging that political reform was just around the corner. His moderate reputation evaporated at the start of the uprising after he delivered a disjointed address vowing that Libya would flow with blood. He was later indicted by the International Criminal Court, accused of crimes against humanity during the uprising.

Among Seif’s brothers, Muatassim, Hannibal and Khamis were military officers who commanded their own brigades. Muatassim headed the National Security Council but was better known for carousing in hot spots like the Caribbean island of St. Bart’s, where he was reported to have paid several singers, including Mariah Carey, $1 million each for appearing at his holiday parties. Hannibal gained notoriety for beating his wife and servants in luxurious European hotels. After Hannibal was arrested in Switzerland in 2008, Colonel Qaddafi broke off diplomatic relations and held two Swiss businessmen hostage.

The anti-Qaddafi forces said they killed Khamis, once head of the feared Khamis Brigade guarding Tripoli, in late August as he and his bodyguards were trying to break through a rebel checkpoint.

Another son, Saadi, a military officer, had been a professional soccer player who was allowed onto Italian teams more for the publicity than for his skills. The seventh son, Seif al-Arab, had no public profile.

The daughter, Aisha, gained attention as a lawyer after she offered to join the large legal defense team of Saddam Hussein.

Colonel Qaddafi was also believed to have adopted two children: Hanna and Milad, a nephew.

As the opaque circle around Colonel Qaddafi shrank, his sons increasingly became his advisers, but it was never clear if he had anointed any one of them as his successor. He was believed to play one off against the other, granting and then withholding favor, just as he did with anyone who might challenge his authority.

A Quirkier Character

As Colonel Qaddafi grew older, the trim, handsome officer with short black hair gave way to someone more flamboyant. Brocade and medals festooned his military uniforms, as if he were some Gilbert & Sullivan admiral, while his black curls grew long and unruly. After he adopted Africa as his cause, he favored African robes in a riot of colors.

His long effort to eliminate the government left Libya in a shambles, its sagging infrastructure belying its oil wealth. That fact never seemed to bother Colonel Qaddafi. “Once he was in a position to sustain himself, the fact that nothing improved in Libya was something he did not notice,” said Lisa Anderson, the president of the American University in Cairo.

He was “notoriously mercurial,” a cable obtained through WikiLeaks said, a man who “avoids making eye contact” during meetings and thinks nothing of “long, uncomfortable periods of silence.” He would sometimes show up hours late for a state banquet honoring an African head of state, then sit in a far corner before bolting away. African leaders accepted this behavior in exchange for a check for a million dollars or two, diplomats said. After he put his worst years of sponsoring terrorism behind him, the West and the rest of the Arab world tended to treat him as comic opera, though he could still outrage, as he did in 2009, when, appearing for the first time before the United Nations General Assembly, he spoke for some 90 minutes instead of his allotted 15 and seemed to tear a copy of the charter, condemning the Security Council as a feudal organization.

When scores of children in a Benghazi hospital developed AIDS, most likely because of unsanitary conditions, Colonel Qaddafi accused the C.I.A. of developing the virus that caused it and of sending a group of Bulgarian nurses to spread it in Libya. The nurses were arrested, tortured, tried and sentenced to death before eventually being freed.

He never tired of pushing his idea for an Israeli-Palestinian solution, a unified country called “Isratine” in which both Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights as soon as all Palestinian refugees were allowed to return. The proposal elicited derision from other Arab leaders or senior officials.

Capricious Dictates

At home, though, Libyans suffered under his dictates. He switched from the standard Muslim calendar to one marking the years since the Prophet Muhammad’s death, only to decide later that the birth year was a more auspicious place to start. Event organizers threw up their hands and reverted to the Western calendar. He also decided that he disliked the names of both the Western and Eastern months, so he renamed them. February was Lights. August was Hannibal.

Given the conceit that “popular committees” — and not Colonel Qaddafi himself — ran the country, everyone was required to attend committee sessions called at random once or twice a year to discuss an agenda “suggested” by the grand guide. Every single office — schools, government ministries, airlines, shops — had to shut for days, sometimes weeks. Scofflaws risked fines.

Colonel Qaddafi once declared that that any money over $3,000 in anyone’s bank account was excessive and should revert to the state. Another time he lifted a ban on sport utility vehicles, then changed his mind a few months later, forcing everyone who had bought one to hide it.

Libyans grumbled that they had no idea what had happened to their oil money; the official news agency said the country earned $32 billion in 2010 alone. When prices were low or Libya was under sanctions during most of the 1980s and ’90s, the nearly one million people on the public payroll never got a pay raise; experts calculated that most lived on $300 to $400 per month.

The general disarray was another way of ensuring that no one developed the confidence and connections to try to overthrow him. Libyans lived constantly on edge. “It is an awful feeling when you don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring,” said Dr. Kikhia, the biographer. “People don’t work —they cannot make a decision at any level.”

Colonel Qaddafi saw his rule as a never-ending quest, without ever defining the objective. “The state of Libya was a state of constant revolution, which suggests there was no goal,” said Mr. Matar, the novelist. “It was all false; it was a way to keep them all occupied.”

When revolutions succeeded in two Arab neighbors, deposing the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, Colonel Qaddafi was among the only leaders in the region to speak out publicly. The people had been swayed by foreign plots, he maintained. He tried to warn his people that Tunisians now lived in fear of being killed at home or on the streets. But few Tunisians died.

Many Libyans did, however, when he unleashed his forces against them during the uprising, though he rejected the idea that Libyans were rioting. All his people loved him and would die for him, he said.

“In the past Libyans lacked an identity,” Colonel Qaddafi roared in the February speech. “When you said Libyan, they would tell you Libya, Liberia, Lebanon — they didn’t know Libya! But today you say Libya, they say Libya — Qaddafi, Libya — the revolution!”

 

 

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

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